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I’m a big pedal steel fan, so when Jason Isbell started talking about it on the Broken Record podcast I took note.

The pedals are so small, and they’re so close together, that if you don’t wear the right kind of shoes you’ll accidentally hit more than one pedal at a time. So this is why pedal steel is a true cowboy instrument, because cowboy boots are what you wear in order to be able to hit just one pedal at a time.

Pedal steel (a key country music instrument) also has a learning curve.

What are the pedal steels and cowboy boots of what you’re trying to do? Are you using the right ones?

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From episode three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs:

Once you give a collection of things a name—the way people’s minds work—they start thinking because those things share a name, they’re the same kind of thing.

Names and genres and labels matter.

The human brain is designed to pattern match and categorize and bucket and metaphor to save on processing power.

(Neural networks are designed to do this for AI models via weights.)

In grocery aisles, “water company” usually means plastic bottles—it’s what shoppers expect. Liquid Death smashes that expectation, so it stands out.

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Finished reading: The Last Horse: Prologue by Aaron Tucker 📚

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Finished reading: John Constantine, Hellblazer Vol. 8: Rake at the Gates of Hell by Garth Ennis 📚

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The more you know 💫

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron, wrote the first algorithm created specifically for a machine.

-Tom Asacker